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linux.conf.au Linux: for all things great and small
linux.conf.au Linux: for all things great and small | Linux: for all things great and small |
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| Open Sauce - Linux Blog | |
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 18 November 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 6 Bannon says that as a traditional UNIX person, he was a little taken aback. "We were using Linux for our mail servers and file servers and Samba and things like that but for the really big iron, I must say that I really didn't consider Linux as part of the model. And yet, everywhere I went, all our end users were saying that was what they wanted. So we came back and said we would have to have another look at our plans. We went out and spoke to the vendors at the time and they were very supportive." Featured Whitepaper
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VPAC ended up with an IBM system running a version of Red Hat. In Bannon's words, "it ran like a dream'. Why did the customers want Linux? "There were a few ideologues who wanted it just because it was Linux, there were a few who wanted it because they already had their own applications running on Linux desktops and wanted to just be able to migrate them across, and a lot of them wanted it because it was where the exciting end, the risky end of the market, was going," says Bannon. "I must admit that it was quite surprising to me at the time and it was halfway through my series of appointments and surveys before I realised, hey there's a pattern to this. It was only during the second half of my rounds that I listened critically to what I was being told and, boy, it proved to be a very good solution." Appleby adds: "It turns out that in the high-end computing game, Linux now is by far the most common operating system. The big win from people's viewpoint is that it frees you from proprietary software, you can go in and make your own adjustments and tuning and tinkering. With super-computing as you get to the higher end, these things are never completely out-of-the-box solutions. There is always some degree of tuning and fiddling that goes on because the systems are somewhat unique." Bannon says that in those days the model was that if there was a problem, one would faithfully report it to the vendor and they would produce a patch. "You would apply it and all would be good. With Linux the solution is quite different, of course. You go Googling to see who else has had the problem, you check if someone else has got a solution or not and if not you find your own solution and you apply it yourself. In other words, you accept a lot more responsibility for what you are actually doing." And for him, that's the best possible thing "because you actually have control over what you are doing. You are no longer sitting there trying to convince the vendor that there is a problem - and that isn't an implied criticism of any vendor. But there is no doubt that they have lots of installed bases and when a problem crops up, sometimes they may take a little bit of convincing that there is an issue. Then they have to replicate it and in a lot of cases, that can be very, very difficult especially if it's something that's got past their quality control in the first place. Then they have to fix it and they have to ship that fix down. During the time we had the Alpha server, we were used to often doing a rebuild of the server twice a year. That's a thing of the past, all the fixes that (systems manager) Chris (Samuel) organises now, they just pop up transparently on to the system. Users don't see any downtime." Appleby says in the old days of Hp-UX, they used to go to the super computer user group meetings and there would be people from HP doing their report on the rate of fixes of certain things, what crisis was going where and when something would be fixed. "But typically they were somewhat short-staffed and they would be thrown on to the loudest, largest customer who normally turned out to be a large government lab somewhere. It wasn't that they would be unresponsive, it was just that you couldn't be sure when they would be responding and how long it would take to get it fixed." |
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